Fantastic Ferrocement - For Practical, permanent Elven Architecture, Follies, Fairy Gardens and Other Virtuous Ventures

by Peter Harris

Overview

If you have ever wanted to sculpt or build in a permanent material that is extremely strong and can be moulded to any shape, ferrocement is the medium for you - and this concise book shows you how.

Tools, techniques and sample projects - a garden pot, angel, dome, and more - are all logically described and illustrated. The many photos showing the building of Cafe Eutopia by the author and his family will inspire and inform, while the introduction and 'Origins' story and updates on the progress of a ferrocement cafe and 'temple' to Love, Beauty, Truth, and Freedom add a deeper dimension to this book which shows the struggle to marry an abstract ideal with a(literally) concrete realisation.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940033171941
Publisher:	Peter Harris
Publication date:	04/18/2012
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

I am sometimes known (by those who approve of wizards) as The Wizard of Eutopia. I live in The Story Ark, an old army barracks on the main road of Kaiwaka, 'The Little Town of Lights' - blink and you miss it, only at night you can't because it has fairy lights everywhere. For twelve years I've been building, also on the main road (well, a little to one side of it), a sculptured ferrocement 'folly' called Café Eutopia.

What is Eutopia and why should you care? Well, it's an organic café, a temple to Love Beauty Truth and Freedom, and a bookshop - not necessarily in that order. See photos. For lots more, taken by tourists from all over the world, just enter 'Cafe Eutopia' in Google images. The tourists love me; the locals keep asking, 'When's he going to finish the darned thing?'

Unbeknown to them, for even more than those twelve years I've also been building a much more ambitious, unseen 'folly' - a fantasy epic named (in a dream after I failed to come up with a title) THE APPLES OF AEDEN. I've also written a few other books, as you can see - fiction, non-fiction and some in between.

To release the writing from the computer screen (and beat the gatekeepers of traditional publishing)I started a digital printshop and developed a quick method of book-binding, and more recently, embossing and 'edge-carving' antique-fantasy-style books (and, at the other end of the book spectrum, ebook uploading).

I spent much of my earlier life, like many of us in the troubled 'post-everything' West, in an angsty quest for Truth (between enterprises intended to feed us but always threatening to consume us - spinning wheels, clocks, oval picture frames). A teen convert to radical Christianity, I thought I should become a Bible translator, so I got a BA in classical Hebrew and Greek. But in the process I 'lost my faith' (quite rationally I think!)and became an angsty agnostic.

To feed a growing family, I tried to focus on the oval frames and sacrificed a few tormented years on the anvil of manufacturing, much of it in a cold, dickensian defunct woollen mills in Dunedin. Upon reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I had an epiphany which saved our business.

But in 1990, just when we had paid off my father-in-law and even started to make some money, the rubberband of my soul (I felt) was stretched to breaking point, and I had to leave the workshops of the North where we had moved, and go to the City to study ...